Before you start developing applications on MapR’s Converged Data Platform, consider how you will get the data onto the
platform, the format it will be stored in, the type of processing or modeling that is required, and how the data will
be accessed.

Before you start developing applications on MapR’s Converged Data Platform, consider how you will get the data onto the
platform, the format it will be stored in, the type of processing or modeling that is required, and how the data will
be accessed.

Once the data is on the MapR platform, explore the various features and components available on the platform and determine
your path. You may want to access data in its initial format or perform some data modeling or processing prior to accessing
the data.

MapR supports public APIs for MapR Filesystem, MapR Database, and MapR Event Store For Apache Kafka. These APIs are available for application development purposes.

Step 4: Set Up the Development Environment

Before you start building the application, figure out how your the application will
connect to the cluster and what the library dependencies and installation requirements are.

Applications are often run on edge nodes which are nodes that are not part of the cluster.
Setting up an edge node so that it can be used to develop and run applications consists of the
following steps:

Selecting a client that you will use to connect to the cluster.

Installing additional clients required for your use case.

Determining the application dependencies.

Note: The dependencies to build and run applications differ based on your use case and the
various types of data or tools that are part of an application.

The following
sub-topics include the various methods to connect to the cluster, and minimal requirements to
build and run applications.

Connect to the Cluster
Application are often run on nodes that are not part of the MapR Cluster. There are many methods to connect to a MapR cluster; this section briefly describes each option.